CHNGES is involved in a variety of projects that focus on reconstructing past climatic and environmental conditions all over the world. Students are working on projects from the Caribbean, Asia, and North America to use various types of proxies, such as cave deposits (speleothems), cave sediments, and water isotopes to better understand temperature, precipitation, and vegetation changes going back thousands of years in the past. These data provide robust records of how Earth is changing and ways in which both natural and human-influenced climate dynamics occur. At CHNGES, we believe the past is the key to the future!